


Le Vin, L'Amitié, et L'Université Avec un Soupçon de Mystère de Meurtre (Wine, Friendship, and University with a Dash of Murder Mystery)

by myglassesaredirty



Category: Psych
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - College/University, Cigarettes, Dark Academia, F/M, Geniuses, Hickeys, Jealousy, Making Out, Murder, Murder Mystery, POV First Person, POV Henry, Platonic Kissing, Secret Crush, Smoking, Underage Drinking, all of them - Freeform, but it's like. social drinking, but it's really not platonic, i started reading the secret history and holy fuck, made up university, not just smoking HOT though all of them are, oh yeah, they just say it is, they're all semi pretentious fucks, we love them tho, we're not going that dark boys
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-05-31 12:48:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19426315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myglassesaredirty/pseuds/myglassesaredirty
Summary: Henry Spencer is a nineteen-year-old with a small-ish habit of smoking. His best friend, Madeleine, wears high-waisted mini skirts and stockings, a book always tucked under her arm as she speaks one of seven languages she knows. Their university is small, tucked away in the small city of Cranston, Rhode Island. Nothing really happens except the learning of new ideas, new concepts – she learns more of the languages she already knows fluently, and he studies ancient texts to see how best to deliver justice. Eastern White Pine University is small and unnoticed by the world.Until Kimberly Phoenix is murdered the night before classes begin. Maddy, Henry, and their friends are bored. They might as well try and solve her murder. Classes are too easy, anyway.





	1. Richiamo Totale

There are moments that stand out a bit more in my mind, years after they have passed. Some of these moments are of no consequence – smoking my first cigarette, coughing at the smoke filling my lungs, or turning my focus to legal studies instead of chemistry. I suppose my life could be different if I had kept my original major or if I had never smoked a cigarette in my life. Brett always loved to debate the idea of the butterfly effect. I never took much stock in the theory that one cough from cigarette smoke could alter the entire course of humanity.

Maybe he has a point. I may not know everything, though I make a point of attending as many classes as I can. If I had never changed my major, I would have been stuck in the science building for most of my college career. Chemistry is interesting enough. Mixing chemicals and creating poisons has a certain appeal, but the best day of my life before all this began was the day I walked into my first American literature class and took the last empty seat. The girl sitting next to me had a certain beauty about her – an intelligence behind her eyes, even if her face was younger than the rest of ours, a confidence that straightened her spine and shoulders, that let her hold her head up high. Her fingernails were painted dark green and silver, and her golden hair framed her face.

She was a goddess, Aphrodite, the very picture of beauty and love. I lost my breath at my first glance at her, and I could no longer remember how to speak as I lowered myself into the seat next to her. In my experience, girls that pretty were not often the most receptive to any conversation I could salvage in my mind. However, she turned to me, stretched out her right hand, and grinned brightly. “I’m Madeleine Baker,” she said, and her voice, like her hair, was golden, a ray of sunshine slanting through the forest on a clear afternoon. In a weird way, she reminded me of Lucy Pevensie from Narnia. I had neither read nor watched Narnia since I was eight years old, but the only difference I could see was in hair color.

I cleared my throat and shook her hand. At the time, I figured she came from a wealthy background; she had a leather-bound journal sitting on her desk and a Brooks Brothers pen in her left hand. Brooks Brothers pens are expensive, though efficient, and the last time I saw an advertisement for one, a single pen brought in $1,200. Leather-bound journals are not cheap, either.

“Henry Spencer,” I said, though my voice was rough. I gestured to my dirty messenger bag, with all its tears and unraveled threads. I didn’t know what to say; she was a pretty girl, and it’s hard for me to think around pretty girls. I still have difficulty sometimes when I see her. “Uh…what’s your major?”

A smile curled onto her pink lips, and she tucked a strand of her golden-thread hair behind her ear. “I’m a Greek literature major.” She drummed her manicured nails against the desk while we waited for the professor to enter the room. “I grew up as an Army brat, moving around most of Europe throughout my childhood, but Greece was my favorite country.” She tilted her head to the side, a faraway look in her eyes. It seemed that the very mention of Greece was enough to take her back to the country without her leaving her seat. She shook her head, the fantasy gone. “This was the only university I could find with Greek literature as an offered major.”

Sometimes, it’s hard for me to believe that Eastern White Pine University was ever accredited by an accreditation agency. It is a small liberal arts college in Cranston, Rhode Island, and it offers many majors that no other undergraduate university offers. For example, Madeleine’s Greek literature or my legal studies. There are a few other obscure majors, but for the most part, they have relatively normal programs, but the emphasis is clearly in the humanities. The student body is made up of less than four thousand students, many of whom know somewhat of each other.

Madeleine – I call her Maddy now (with the  _ y, _ yes; she was particular about that) but I was too nervous at the time to call her anything but her full given name – blinked quizzically at me. “What about you? What’s your major?”

I fiddled with my watch. My father had scraped enough money together with night shifts and overtime and lost vacation time to buy me a gold-plated watch for my high school graduation. He figured, with me going off to a liberal arts college, that I should at least look the part in some respect. “I’m– I’m a legal studies major.”

Madeleine smiled, her nose crinkling in delight. I hadn’t noticed before, but she had small freckles on her nose and cheeks. They were hard to see, paler than most freckles tend to be. “That’s nice! Do you want to be a lawyer?”

She was bubbly then, and she’s bubbly now. She has to reserve her energy for our son now, but back then, she was excited to be in a new place, to soothe her wanderlust. A part of me is still convinced that one of the biggest reasons she chose to come to Eastern White Pine was because of the aesthetic: the old, dusty bookstores crammed near each other downtown, the beautiful trees where leaves turned red and golden and orange in the fall, a nearly secret society that no one in the city is entirely aware of, literature teachers, wool sweaters and high-waisted skirts and stockings (not that she ever looked bad in such an outfit).

Whatever brought her to Eastern White Pine, I was glad for it. For one thing, I had heard that this professor only let students choose their seats on the first day of class, and after that, the seating chart was set for the rest of the semester. I had an opportunity to talk to a beautiful girl, no matter how difficult it might have been for me at the time.

I licked my lips and set my elbows on the desk. Expecting her to point out my poor manners, I quickly moved my elbows away from the desk, pushing my hand through my hair instead. “I don’t know,” I said lamely. “Quite possibly.” For the first time, I felt like I could smile around her, so I offered her a smirk. “Or maybe I’ll come back here and teach legal studies.”

Madeleine shook her head. “Where are you from? Your accent isn’t from here.”

“California. Santa Barbara, to be specific.”

She wrinkled her brow, her mouth falling open. “You mean, you came all the way from California to here?” She leaned forward, propping her chin in her hand. “What is California like? What is the ocean like? I’ve never– I mean, I have technically been to the ocean before, but only the Atlantic, and it’s none too fun to visit the beaches in Europe, anyways.”

I laughed softly. “The water is a lot warmer in the Pacific, especially since we’re further south. I used to surf for a few years until I had an accident. I wasn’t too fond of going out into the water after that.” Despite popular belief, not all of California is made up of movie stars; in fact, most of California is absent of celebrities, except for San Francisco and Los Angeles, and I never met any. Well, that’s not true. Once, I went on a school trip to LA, and I bumped into Ryan Reynolds. He glared at me, and I mumbled an apology to him and ran off to catch up with my class. Though, in retrospect, he probably wasn’t  _ glaring _ at me. He was wearing sunglasses. I was mildly terrified.

Madeleine twisted her lips. Before she could say anything more, the door swung open, and Professor Maxwell stepped inside. He was a bit of a scrawny man, with wire-framed glasses and hunched shoulders. I expected his class to go terribly. It ended up being one of my favorites. Though, in fairness, that was in part due to Madeleine.

That day, I walked back into my dorm room, and Brett asked me who the girl was. He met her the next day in his sociology class.

* * *

As life-changing as my first day of class was  _ (life-changing, _ I say, as if I had reached a crossroads, stepped onto the road less traveled, and chosen the destiny of my life), my freshman year of college was quite uneventful. Brett met not only Maddy in his sociology class, but he met her roommate, Karen Dunlap. Karen is almost a crude sort of person, though that’s mostly because of her bluntness. She speaks her mind, and she doesn’t usually keep her mouth shut. Her tongue is sharp, and it is a rule well-known in the entire state of Rhode Island that you never get on Karen’s bad side. She will make your life a living hell.

I learned, in my fall semester, that Maddy was not, in fact, wealthy. Her father had sent her back to the United States when she was fourteen so she would have an easier time getting accepted into an American university. She had stayed with her aunt and attended a public high school in Cincinnati for four years, where she played soccer and graduated valedictorian with little difficulty. The woman can speak six languages with perfect fluency – seven, including English. Graduating top of her high school class was almost unfair to her other classmates. She even worked two jobs, one in fast food and one as a tutor, in order to afford leather-bound books and journals. It was her one indulgence.

Brett, I already knew, was not particularly wealthy. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father a firefighter, so he worked his way through college, grading professors’ papers with bleary eyes. He was there on scholarship, much like I was, but he wanted to visit home far more than I did.

Karen, on the other hand, was the richest of us all. She never disclosed what her father did for a living, but the rumor was that he was involved in some oil company. None of us really believed it, not when Karen was so against gasoline and oil. She advocated for clean sources of energy and swore that she would make clean energy affordable to everyone one day.

In the second semester of college, we all shared a philosophy class. Our professor was a kind man, and he found our questions and comments to be the most intriguing of the class. The rest of the students in his room were of the pretentious variety. They had money and they liked to flaunt it. They were there, not because they were particularly interested in the school, but because it was a place where they fit in. Many of the students in the class were taking philosophy to fulfill their logic credit. Brett, as a mathematics major, was there to fulfill his humanities elective. I had practically had to drag him out of his bed for the first day of philosophy class, but after five minutes, he vibrated with excitement.

There was only one other girl in the class, aside from my two girl friends, who really stood out to me. Her name was Kimberly Phoenix. She was pretty, though not in the way that Maddy was. Maddy was stunning, breathtaking. Every laugh, every time she leaned into my side with either laughter or exhaustion, my heart warmed and I pulled her closer. Kimberly wasn’t quite like that. She was an elite pretty, one that is, in some way, pretentious. The university held a formal for the entire school in late February, and she stood at the fringes of the social, swirling a glass of red wine. I don’t know how she got it or was allowed to drink it. We were, most of us, underage.

At that formal, Karen nudged me and nodded to Kimberly. “She likes you,” she said before disappearing with her boyfriend into the crowd.

Maddy glanced up at me and leaned into my side. Since neither of us were particularly close with members of the opposite sex – save Brett, for her, and Karen, for me – we had decided to attend the formal together. Her dress hugged her figure, and I idly wondered to myself what it would feel like to run my hands over her dress while we kissed in a secluded hallway.

“Do you like her?” she asked me. Her voice was stilted, trying to push any emotion away. Jealousy, maybe, was the source of the odd note in her voice, but I was too flabbergasted to think much of it.

I choked on my punch. “What?” I said, coughing. “I barely know her. I had, like, one class with her. I had to give her my notes, and that was our only interaction.”

Maddy smirked. “She checks you out in the gym.”

I furrowed my brow and glanced down at her. “How do you know that? You’re never at the gym.”

She held up an index finger and tapped it against the tip of my nose. “Ah, but that is where you are wrong. I don’t work out with  _ you _ when I go to the gym. And I know that you won’t threaten me into coming to the gym. Karen will. She has, and she always follows through on her threats. I go with her, and since you’re at the gym all the freaking time, it only follows that I saw you there, too.”

I passed my punch to her, and she took a grateful drink.

With my glass of punch, she gestured to Kimberly, who still stood at the edge of the room, her eyes cutting through everyone. I figured her to be a mixture of Maddy and Karen, just about eighteen times more pretentious. “Kimberly only goes to the gym to watch you. She doesn’t hide it. She just takes up one of the machines and sits and watches you.”

I pursed my lips and nodded slowly. I wanted to ask her if anyone had spiked the punch, but, having tasted it myself, I knew that wasn’t the case. “If you want complete honesty,” I said hesitantly, “we hooked up my first weekend here.”

Maddy gaped at me. “You didn’t.”

I kept nodding. “Yep,” I said, popping the  _ p. _ “Not exactly my proudest moment. I never called her back, and things got awkward, especially when I would see her in class.”

Maddy narrowed her eyes at me. “Were you drunk?”

I bit my bottom lip. “Does tipsy count as drunk?”

She rolled her eyes and straightened. “You shouldn’t drink underage.”

“Oh, you’re one to talk, little miss let’s-sneak-this-wine-into-the-boys’-room-and-assume-nothing-goes-wrong.”

“I only say that you shouldn’t drink underage because you also smoke.”

“My cigarette is only lit one in every five times you see me with one in my mouth.” I shuddered at the thought. “I hate the taste of it.”

She sighed heavily. “Then why do you do it?”

I smirked and gently elbowed her. “The aesthetic.”

Kimberly wasn’t really anyone of consequence. All I really knew about her, aside from her appreciation for red wine, was that she hailed from California, though she came from San Francisco. She wrote in cursive. She liked to stick her tongue down your throat if she was drunk and horny.

I may not have known much, but I did know that she was not the type to commit suicide. When classes resumed after the summer, the biology professor saw her dangling from the ceiling. A few people argued that it was a grotesque suicide. Most everyone figured it was odd that she was hanging from the ceiling in a classroom that hadn’t even been open to the students yet.

The police ruled it a murder and turned it over to the FBI.

Maddy, Brett, Karen, and I were bored, so we decided that we could solve the case before the FBI could.

* * *

The night before classes resumed, Brett, Karen, Maddy, and I met in the common room. When I was younger, I had always imagined attending a university with crammed dorm rooms, hardly enough room to study, but Eastern White Pine hadn’t planned for that. Originally, there were only about two thousand students at the school, and when enrollment doubled, they built two other dormitories. Every dormitory had a similar common room on the first floor, but the girls told me that their fireplace was gas and not wood.

Either way, Maddy texted me close to six in the evening that she and Karen were coming over and for Brett and me to meet them in the common room.

No one really used the common room in Havingford Hall anymore. The girls, Brett, and I had more or less commandeered the place, and during the school year, the coffee table was littered with books and assignments, candy wrappers and Burger King, odd sketches of scenes from  _ The Office _ and incoherent summaries of various books.

Brett and I stumbled into the common room at six o’clock sharp, flicking each other’s ears. He took my glasses from the bridge of my nose and held them high above his head. I used to try and fight to get them back, but the last time I did, we ended up accidentally breaking them, and my glasses can get expensive. Especially considering how poor my prescription is.

For all of Maddy’s fashion, she only dressed nice for class and formal occasions. When hanging out, she often wore a shirt too large for her – usually one of mine – and comfortable pants. That night was no exception. She stood in front of the hearth, brushing the tip of her finger over it, bringing it away to look at the amount of dust. Satisfied, she turned around and smiled when she saw me squinting at me. At least, I assume that she was smiling. There really is no way to be certain.

Brett passed me my glasses and leapt over the back of the couch. Karen held up a brown paper bag. “I have wine,” she said, and Brett immediately leaned forward and cleared off the coffee table.

I nodded to Maddy’s shirt. “I thought you hated the Lumineers,” I said, fishing in my pocket. My fingers brushed against a cigarette, and I rocked up onto the balls of my feet, debating if I should stick it in my mouth or not.

Her lips turned downwards in a slight frown. “But your shirt is extremely comfortable, and I’m going to keep wearing it.” She pointed to my hand in my pocket. “Please tell me there are no cigarettes in there.”

I lifted my hands in surrender. “I wasn’t going to light one, I swear!”

She shook her head. “You end up lighting it sooner or later. Do not,” she took a step forward, jabbing a finger in my direction, “put that thing in your mouth.”

I slid into my favorite chair. Karen produced four red solo cups and began to pour the wine. Brett held each cup to avoid unnecessary spills. “Listen, we’re about to drink wine,” I turned to face her and pointed my finger at her in response, “which  _ is _ illegal, especially for you, since you’re not even nineteen yet. I’ve been allowed to smoke cigarettes for over a year.”

Maddy pouted and crawled into the same chair I was sitting in, curling onto my lap. “I’m going to be nineteen next week.”

“Which doesn’t negate the fact that literally all of us in here are underage.”

Karen tilted her head back and groaned. “For  _ once _ in your goddamn life, Spencer, can you not be a narc?” She began passing the red solo cups around. “Just drink and be merry!”

Brett sipped from his cup. “We are still planning to make a trip to Providence this weekend, right?”

I rolled my eyes, my free arm curling around Maddy’s waist. “Oh, don’t tell me that you’re still hung up on that girl from freshman year.”

Brett frowned. “Why would you assume the contrary? She and I hit it off immediately.” He swished the wine around in his glass. “Her name is Sharon.”

Maddy’s lips quirked into a smile, and she brought her cup up to her lips. “Yes, we know, Brett. All of us were there when you met her.”

Karen perched herself on the armrest. “And all of us watched as you two conspicuously made out.”

He scoffed. “It was not conspicuous.”

I blinked. “Dude. You two were sitting at the bar. It was a game of tonsil hockey. That was the grossest making out I’ve ever witnessed in my entire days on this planet.”

Brett narrowed his eyes at me. “Oh,  _ you’re _ one to talk. Remember Chelsea?”

I made a face. “I was extremely drunk with her.  _ But _ I didn’t watch myself make out with her.”

Maddy sighed, pulling away from my chest. She tipped her head back and chugged the rest of her wine, and I moved my hand to grab the cup from her. Maddy is and always has been a lightweight. That one cup was enough to get her tipsy. “Well, speaking as someone who saw both, I’d have to say you making out with Chelsea was grosser.”

A few years later, Karen told me that it really was Brett and Karen who were more disgusting, but Maddy had been looking at it through the lens of one who is jealous.

At any rate, I managed to take the red solo cup from Maddy without incident. “I make mistakes on occasion. Anyways, I thought we were still going to make our weekend trips to Providence. While you go track down your freshman fling, the girls and I can go do something else.”

Karen sat up straighter. “Like target practice.”

Maddy glared at her and turned back to me. Her fingers curled into my t-shirt, and her eyes, though slightly foggy from the wine, were a dazzling blue that I had only ever seen on a clear winter day, when the snow sparkled on the ground. I always lost my breath on those days, and even then, when Maddy was merely gazing into my eyes, I lost my breath. “Like a museum?”

I nodded, unable to trust my voice to say anything for fear of sounding like a croaking frog. Her hand rested over my heart, and I knew then, as I know now, that she could feel my heart beneath her fingertips, that she was more than aware of the way my heart hammered with her proximity.

She smiled. “Perfect.” She shifted in my lap so that her right arm pressed against my chest. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, but for now, I say that we get your laptops and watch television.”

Brett whimpered. “Please tell me you’re not going to choose something depressing like  _ The Book Thief _ or any other World War II story. I’m already mourning the death of my GPA.”

Karen rolled her eyes.

Maddy leaned away to free her right arm and began tapping her hand against my shoulder. “Do you still have Ocean’s Eleven on your laptop do you do you do you, Henry, do you still have Ocean–”

I couldn’t help but chuckle. “Yeah, I have it.” Not wanting to disturb Maddy or move her off my lap, I looked at Brett. Giving him the best puppy dog eyes I could muster, I asked, “Can you please go to our dorm and get our laptops? Pretty please? With a cherry on top?”

Brett groaned but pushed himself off of the couch, setting his cup down on the coffee table. “The physical appearance of please does not change matters, Henry.” He stretched and pointed at me. “I’m only doing this because I’m scared of Karen.”

I laughed, and Karen chuckled, too. It was no secret that all of us were, to some degree, scared of her. She had a sharp tongue, deadly eyes, and the rumor was that she knew around four forms of martial arts, whereas Brett and I only knew two apiece. Maddy knew none, reasoning that one of us would protect her if the situation ever came down to it.

Maddy tucked her face into the crook of my neck. “What’s your first class tomorrow?”

I swirled my wine and frowned, studying the wooden door that led to the outdoors. It was old, probably rotten in some places, and I vaguely recalled a few boys fixing the hinges the year before. “I, uh…” Scratching my eyebrow, I cleared my throat and tried again. “I have biology with Professor Wixor.”

Maddy nodded, her golden hair brushing against the skin on my neck. I grimaced internally and shifted in my seat. “I have him, too. Same time, I think.” She lifted her head just slightly, enough that I could no longer feel the weight against my shoulder, but not so far that her hair didn’t brush against my shirt. “What time?”

I chewed my bottom lip. “Nine o’clock. I have his lab on Thursdays.”

Karen groaned and moved from the armrest to the couch. “Did you hide your computer or something, Henry?”

I shook my head. “Nah. Brett probably got a call or text or something from that girl of his. He gets distracted by that, you know.”

Karen smirked and took a sip from her cup, eyeing the rest of the bottle of wine. “Or a sext, if they’re there yet.”

I frowned and stared at the wine in my own cup. “Right.”

One thing about Maddy that you might want to know: when she is tipsy, ever, she gets a little horny. Not “oh my God, rip off my clothes and take me” type of horny. One drink usually causes her to press kisses to my neck, and these kisses almost always end in a hickey somewhere around my neck. Depending on how quickly she gave me the hickey, she was jealous and trying, in a sense, to mark her territory. Other times, it was just because she wanted to give me a hickey.

Maddy reached up and gently grabbed my chin, tilting it to expose my neck to her a bit more. “Stay tranquille,” she murmured. Her lips pressed softly though firmly against my neck, her tongue trailing a little circle around the pulse point. Her right hand scratched at the base of my hairline, and though we may not yet have been dating, I loved these moments more than anything else in the world. It was her and me, from the beginning. She would occasionally kiss me in moments of happiness and sobriety –  _ Anása fréskou aéra, _ she would call it, a breath of fresh air – and I delighted in the fact that neither Karen nor Brett ever were kissed by Madeleine.

Maddy shifted so that she straddled my lap and gently rocked back and forth. My eyelids fluttered closed, involuntarily, of course. I never could help but close my eyes when her lips were against my neck, nor could I help the way I wanted to turn my face and capture her lips in mine when she straddled me like this. I wanted her to be mine, and I always pulled her closer.

She smiled against my skin and began sucking half an inch to the left of my pulse point. Her teeth nipped against the skin, her tongue traced her name on the bruise, marking herself there for tomorrow and the next day and the rest of the week.  _ Entirely platonic, _ we tried to say, we tried to pass off, but Brett and Karen witnessed this on more than one occasion, and they refused to call it as such.

She pulled back, brushing her hair away from her face, and blew cool air onto my hickey. Before she could give me another mark, Brett sauntered into the common room, holding my laptop over his head.

“Greetings! I bring you good tidings of great –” he stopped, his arm falling to his side, though he kept his grip on my laptop. “Are you two back to doing this again?”

Maddy twisted back to her original position, blinking innocently – though foggily – up at Brett. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Brett rolled his eyes and set my laptop on the coffee table. “Is this just because you found out that Kimberly Phoenix is in your biology class with Wixor tomorrow morning?”

To my surprise, Maddy flushed bright red. “Why would you think that?”

Brett winked at me. “No reason.” He pointed at my laptop. “Henry, please unlock this for me. Por favor.”


	2. Futilités et Profondeurs (Trivialities and Profundities)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We worry too much about the little things. We worry so much about the little things that we miss the big things, and when we catch the big things, it's a shock.
> 
> Like finding a dead body in your biology class, for example.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So um. There's a lot of smoking. Just so you know. And it's bad. But the aesthetic. We'll work on breaking bad habits later.

It’s funny how we, as people, worry about the inconsequential: about what shoes to wear, about finding a shirt to match these pants, about homework and how much you binge watched television the night before, about books that are recommended by society but for which you have to fake enjoyment. We indulge in the inconsequential, devote our entire lives to these trivialities, when there are much more menacing things that lie ahead.

The day classes began in my sophomore year of college, I stood at my dorm room sink, studying my reflection in the mirror. Brett’s first class wasn’t until eleven o’clock, and he groaned when my alarm went off. He had drunk more wine than I had the night before; though, in fairness, he likely wasn’t hungover. Only Maddy would be facing any sign of a hangover.

I pulled at the collar of my shirt. Maddy had left a hickey high on my neck, too high for me to cover with anything but concealer or a turtleneck. Seeing as how it was too warm outside for a turtleneck – even in my Californian opinion, where I frequently wore suit jackets in seventy degree weather – my only option was concealer, and I didn’t own any. The only people I knew who did were Karen and Maddy; other girls, of course, had concealer, but I was only on close enough terms to consider asking Karen or Maddy, and neither would let me have any. Karen took great joy in watching my face flush beet red from all the stares, and Maddy gave me a hickey for the purpose of me displaying it.

A part of me wanted to cover it up, to run to the nearest store, buy some concealer  _ (“It’s an emergency,” _ I would have said.  _ “My girlfriend ran out of concealer, and she’s still getting dressed.”), _ and cover up the purple-blue bruise sitting pretty on my neck, but I wasn’t a particularly good liar back in the day.

Brett pulled his pillow over his head. “For Christ’s sake, Henry,” he said in a muffled voice, “just go to class with the hickey.”

At any rate, I was late for class, so I grabbed my ratty messenger bag and checked to make sure everything was tucked away safely. Seeing as how I had everything, I grabbed  _ Im Westen nichts Neues _ – the original translation of  _ All Quiet on the Western Front _ – and slipped out the door.

Rhode Island was refreshing to me, back in the day. Trees lined the pathways to each class, casting a shaded glance over tree swings and benches. Some of the bigger trees stood high above some of the smaller buildings, covering the red brick in falling leaves and cool shelter. White pine trees were spread throughout the entire campus, one standing guard by each building. Brett and I learned that the pine trees don’t make the best firewood, and we might have been yelled at by the administration, but there was no tangible proof that  _ we _ had been the ones to cut down the school’s namesake. It was us, admittedly, but there was no proof of it.

Two pairs of footsteps ran up behind me, and Maddy leaned into my side, her cheeks flushed with pink. Her eyes sparkled, and she looped her arm through mine.

Karen wolf-whistled. “Is that a hickey I see, Mr. Spencer?”

I rolled my eyes and grabbed the coffee cup from her hands. “You know it is, you were there when I got it.” I took a sip from her coffee and gagged. “Ugh, gross, you still drink it black.”

Karen glared at me. “Of course I still drink it black. That’s the only way coffee is healthy for you.”

Maddy lifted her head and grinned brightly. “Tea is better for you, though.” She reached up with her free hand and touched the hickey on my neck. “It’s a good look on you.”

I rolled my eyes again, this time for Maddy’s benefit. “So is this or is this not for Kimberly’s benefit? I need to know if I have to show it off to her.”

Maddy ducked her head and blushed. Her feet stumbled, and I reached to catch her. Her eyes caught the title of the book in my right hand, and she sighed deeply, pressing her free hand into her eyes. “ Mou árese to vivlío,” she murmured. She tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Dekára Germanoí.”

I elbowed her gently. “Come now, Mad, I don’t think the Germans are all that bad.”

She sniffled. “Damn German writing, then.”

I looked up at the sky. The sun rose later in the east coast, a situation with which I was entirely unfamiliar and uncomfortable, as compared to the west coast, and the last tendrils of the sunrise slanted through the leaves. A breeze blew on my neck, and I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath. “One bad German writer does not make all German writers bad.”

Maddy pursed her lips. “True. But German is just…such a harsh language.”

I leaned closer to her, my lips brushing against her ear. “And you’re such a romantic, aren’t you?”

Her mouth dropped open, and she stopped, pulling at my arm to get me to slow down. “And just what is that –”

Karen cleared her throat. “Guys? I don’t mean to interrupt your flirtatious banter, but what do you think is going on there?”

I turned around, and Maddy stood on her tiptoes to peer over my shoulder. “Hey, that’s the science building.”

Karen lolled her head to laser me with another glare. “No shit, Sherlock.”

“Fuck you, Watson,” I said under my breath.

Karen squinted at me, deciding if the classic response was worth a retort on her part, but she just pointed to the building. “There’s a crowd of people over there, and there is no way that everyone is taking their science course right now at nine o’clock. Hell, I’m not even supposed to be in that building – I have French.”

I glanced at her. “I thought you hated French.”

“I do. I have to take it. German is full, and I’m not taking another damn year of Spanish.”

Maddy blinked, unamused. “Hello?” She waved her hand in the air. “French and Spanish aficionado, here. I love both languages.”

Karen rolled her eyes and shrugged her backpack higher up her shoulder. “Anyways, what’s the deal there? Why is…the whole school and then some there?”

I bit my lip. “I have no clue, but might as well try and figure it out.” Maddy and I started moving in the direction of the science building, my hand hovering over her back. “Karen, just get to class. Your class. In the correct building.”

Karen smirked, tilted her head back, and chugged the rest of her coffee. She waited for a moment, eyes squeezed shut, hand held to her heart, and let out a slow breath. “No way am I missing whatever’s going on.” She jogged to catch up to us and tossed her coffee cup in a trash can. “What do you think is going on? A fight?” She smacked my shoulder. “Ohhh, what if it’s an arrest?”

Maddy hugged her books to her chest. “What would any of these professors get arrested for?”

Karen pursed her lips. “I never said anything about professors, but now that you mention it, a professor could be arrested for blackmail, soliciting sex –”

“Also known as prostitution,” I said. Maddy glared at me. I cleared my throat and walked faster.

Karen glared at me, too. “Okay, prostitution is the technical term for it. Professors could also be dealing narcotics, show indecent public behavior –”

Maddy lifted her eyebrows and snorted. “Like that would cut off any of their tenure.”

Unfortunately, Maddy had a point. One professor – Professor Morsten, I believe, though I never knew the man – had been charged with rape, but even the conviction wasn’t enough for the university to sever his tenure. In fact, the school was hesitant to fire him – even though he was literally a convicted felon who was about to serve 15 years – and Morsten eventually just told them that he couldn’t teach ever again.

Karen narrowed her eyes. “Basically, they could be doing pretty much anything, and they could be arrested. Doesn’t mean that their tenure will be severed, it just means that Cranston police are doing their job and arresting someone for any reason.”

My right hand twitched. I wanted a cigarette.

Maddy shook her head in disagreement, and she turned her head to talk to me, but she first saw me stick my hand in my pocket for a cigarette. “You better not be getting a cigarette.”

I pulled my hand away from my pocket as if it had been burned. “What?” I scoffed. “Nooooo.” Quickly, I cleared my throat and slung my arm around her shoulders. “Well, Karen, what do  _ you _ think that it is?”

Karen fiddled with the cuffs of her sleeves. “I think,” she said slowly, tilting her head to either side, “that it was…some sort of crime. Maybe a student is dealing narcotics.” Her eyes lit up and she ran ahead of us, pivoted, and started walking backwards. “Maybe somebody was murdered!”

I snorted, pulling Maddy closer to my side. Even she was smiling. “Yeah, right. A murder on campus in quiet Cranston.”

Karen pointed her index finger at me. “Technically, Cranston is one of the more dangerous cities in Rhode Island.”

My steps faltered, and I stopped, glaring at her. “It’s Rhode Island. It is  _ tiny. _ How many cities are there in Rhode Island? Huh? By that logic, obviously, one of the bigger cities is going to end up being more dangerous.”

Karen shook her head. “Not in every state. Apparently, none of Texas’ three most populous cities are the most dangerous. It’s actually the small ones.”

I blinked. “It’s Texas. How many cities are there in Texas? Hell, how many counties are there?”

Maddy frowned. “He has a point there, Karen. In a state where there’s really not that many cities, of course one of the more populated ones is going to be more violent.”

Karen pushed her hands through her hair. She dyed it, I think. I could see some streaks of indigo. Maybe it was just my imagination. “Okay, my point is: it could be a murder.”

Maddy shook her head. “It’s doubtful that it was. Who would be murdered? Why would they be murdered?” She twisted her lips and shook her head again. “No, I bet it’s some kind of physical fight between the lacrosse players.”

I ducked my head and resumed walking. “We don’t even have a football team.”

Even though I couldn’t see her, I could feel Maddy’s glare. “And give our players concussions? Yeah, not the wisest choice in the world.” She lifted her left hand and jabbed her index finger into my chest. “You might have been one hell of a football player back in your time, but that time is long gone.”

The crowd of people thickened near the entrance. There was another entrance, one near the side, but none of us were entirely too sure of whether it was open, and besides, we wanted to see who was there and what was going on. Besides, if anyone asked, Maddy and I both had class in this building, and Karen was Karen. No one questioned why she did the things she did.

Maddy stayed close to my side, her arm around my waist. I grabbed Karen’s elbow to keep her nearby, lest Jerry the creep (“Fuck Jerry,” Karen would say in unison with Brett, Maddy, and me – none of us particularly liked him, the girls less so than Brett and me) was somewhere in the throngs of people. He had a penchant for knowing exactly where Karen and/or Maddy would be at any given moment. He knew which shower stall they preferred to use at the gym, and he had set up a peeping area across the street from their dorm. Jerry had once grabbed Karen, presumably her breasts, and Karen had slammed the heel of her hand into his nose and broke his thumb, wrist, and nose.

Maddy never told me if Jerry ever tried anything like that with her, but I had overheard Jerry make lewd remarks about her body, and I would always see Maddy shift in her chair, pulling her cardigan or jacket more tightly around her body. My theory is that Jerry decided not to do anything physical after Karen had broken his body, but none of that stopped him from being crass.

I didn’t like him for a host of reasons – the main one being that he made unsolicited moves on my best friends – but I had caught him snorting cocaine in the men’s restroom once. I don’t respect crackheads. I don’t respect people who do drugs. There was never a problem I could imagine that would be any excuse for drugs or alcoholism. Besides, a crackhead shot my father in the chest. We waited three weeks to see if he would live.

At any rate, no one at the school liked Jerry for any reason whatsoever, but since there was never any tangible proof that could hold up in court, Jerry was allowed to do his thing: making girls uncomfortable, peeping on girls while they were changing, snorting crack, likely dealing cocaine. I once thought about reporting him to the police, but Jerry grabbed my shirt and threatened to kill me if I ever told, spit flying from his mouth to my face. Usually, I wouldn’t pay any mind to such a threat, but I think he was dead serious.

Karen stuck close to my side as we waded through the rest of the people. Many people saw her and parted like the Red Sea, and we made our way to the front of the entrance with ease.

There were still more people to wade through.

I glanced over my shoulder. “I don’t see any police cars, Karen,” I whispered, not wanting my voice to carry. I didn’t know who was listening. “Seems like your murder theory is wrong.”

Karen pressed her lips together in a thin line and led the rest of the way to the front. The crowd of people pointed all the way to my biology class with Wixor. Maddy and I glanced at each other and stumbled after Karen.

At Wixor’s door, a few students obscured my view of anything. Karen squeezed past them, and she took a sharp breath, stumbling back into me.

I furrowed my brow. “Karen, what’s wrong?”

Karen gulped, her face pale. I would say her face was pale “like she had seen a ghost,” but her face was whiter than that, almost as white as the frost on the ground during winter. It wasn’t like Karen to be scared of anything – she was scared of ouija boards and spiders, but not of much else – and to see her so white…

I shoved my way past the rest of the students, Maddy still under my arm. At first, I saw nothing wrong, and as I turned my head to ask Karen what had set her off, Maddy screamed.

Her shaking hands covered her mouth, and I followed her gaze to see Kimberly Phoenix hanging from the ceiling.

My mouth fell open. “Oh, my God.”

Karen took in a shaky breath. “Looks like I was right about it being a murder, after all.”

I licked my lips and nodded slowly. “Mad, it looks like you don’t need to worry about Kimberly making a move on me anymore.”

In hindsight, I suppose I deserved to be elbowed in the ribs by Maddy and smacked upside the head by Karen.

*

Classes were cancelled that day. There were some rumors that classes were going to be cancelled for the rest of the week, but the occasional administrator who caught these rumors said that we would all receive an email in due time.

Karen and Maddy were both shaken up about it, Maddy more so than Karen. Kimberly lived in Weisser Hall, one of the girls’ dorms, and both Karen and Maddy lived there with her.

I led both of them away from the scene of the crime to a bench under one of the oak trees. Maddy was shaking under my arm, her fingers twisted into my shirt. Karen hung close to me, too. I helped lower Maddy onto the bench, and pointing to the seat, I told Karen to watch her while I made a call.

The police dispersed the students, trying to figure out who was there first to gather what they had seen. The Cranston police weren’t incompetent, by any means, but dealing with about 2500 people who pretty much all saw the same thing can become overwhelming. Professors dismissed the late arrivers back to their dorm rooms, keeping the students who had found the body at the entrance to the science building.

I stepped off the cobblestone path and stood under the white pine tree by the English building. I fished in my pocket for my phone, my fingers brushing against my pack of cigarettes. I needed one. Like hell, I needed a cigarette. Glancing over my shoulder, I checked to make sure Maddy was preoccupied, pulled out a cigarette, grabbed my lighter from my bag, and lit it. I grabbed it between my fingers, took a long drag, and slowly blew out the smoke.

Smoking wasn’t a habit I particularly wanted to pick up. My dad had always insisted that cigarettes were just as bad as narcotics. My younger brother, Jack, called them cancer sticks and purposefully coughed whenever he was around a smoker in public. For all his faults, his drinking, Jackie never took a smoke, and I will forever respect him for that. In fact, I started smoking because my boss offered me a cigarette before I left for college, and I didn’t want to be disrespectful.

Regardless, I leaned against the trunk of the tree and took a few drags of my cigarette, unbothered by whether Maddy knew I was smoking or not. She was going to get a drink after this, anyways. So was Karen. They would drink to get rid of the memory – maybe not get blackout drunk, maybe not even drunk, but just something to take the edge off – and I would smoke. Both alcohol and smoking were enough to kill us if we did either too much.

After a few more puffs and a glare from Karen (you never have to turn around when you feel Karen’s eyes searing a hole into your skull; anyone knows that Karen is glaring at them just by how uncomfortable you feel when she is), I took my phone from my pocket, pressed Brett’s contact, and held the phone up to my ear.

He answered on the third ring.  _ “What?” _

I took another drag. “I need your help.”

On the other end, I could hear bed springs creak and I knew Brett was pushing a hand through his messy hair. “Are you smoking again?”

I sighed deeply, nearly triggering a coughing fit. “Not exactly.”

“Not exactly isn’t very reassuring, Henry.”

Shaking my head, I shuffled so my back pressed against the bark. “Listen, Brett, I just need you to meet me between the English and science buildings. Something bad has happened, and the girls need both of us.”

“Why don’t you just call Richard?”

I closed my eyes in exasperation, and the image of Kimberly swinging slowly from the ceiling sent a shudder through my entire body. It took me three puffs before I was able to respond. “Richard is needed by the police.”

Brett choked. “Wait,  _ what? _ Why? Did he do something illegal?”

“No.” I stuck my cigarette in my mouth and pushed my now free hand through my hair. “Look, Brett, there was a murder on campus. A body was found hanging from the ceiling.”

Brett was silent for a long time.

From my place at the tree, I could see that Maddy was descending into a mix of hysteria and panic. My theory was that she felt guilty for antagonizing Kimberly for a year for no real reason. My other, less self-absorbed theory was that she was just shaken up by the fact that one of her dormmates was hanging from the ceiling. Maddy has more heart than the rest of us.

“Brett? You still there?”

Brett gulped audibly. “Was it anyone we know?”

I cleared my throat. “Kimberly Phoenix. Maddy’s on her way to a full-blown panic attack, and Karen isn’t much help.”

There was a thud on the other end, and I heard Brett swear quietly. “You said you’re in between the English and science buildings?”

I nodded. “Me, personally? I’m standing underneath the pine tree. There’s a cigarette in my mouth. You can’t miss me. The girls are sitting on a bench about twelve yards away.”

“God, I wish you didn’t smoke.”

“Trust me, Brett,” I said, taking another, much longer drag, “if you had seen what we saw, you’d think about smoking, too.”

*

I couldn’t smoke in the common room. There was a very specific sign hanging conspicuously beside the door and on either entrance from the hall that warned against smoking. I could do whatever I wanted in my dorm room, but in the common room, smoking was entirely off limits. I still have no idea why, when we could build a fire in the common room during the winter.

Maddy sat cross-legged on my bed, chewing her thumbnail while she evaluated the cards lying in front of her. She twirled a jack of hearts in her other hand. There was no place to put it, and she would have to recycle the card soon.

I sat with my back pressed up against the wall. Brett had taken Karen on a walk to calm down and get away from my smoking, which was fair, I suppose. I wished they had stayed, but I was on my third cigarette already, and even Maddy was glaring at me more than normal.

She sighed and tossed the card on the bed, letting it flutter to the mattress face-up. “Henry, why do you think it was her?”

I blew out a puff of smoke. The fresh air filtering through the window was nice, but the breeze was not strong enough to get rid of the putrid smell. I hated smoking, but most of all, I hated the smell. I hated how it seeped into my clothes and Brett’s clothes and our books and mattresses. There was a reason I didn’t light the match very much, but my hands still shook from seeing Kimberly’s body, and I took another drag at the reminder.

“I don’t know,” I said finally, smoke puffing away from my lips. Maddy tilted her head and watched the way the smoke tumbled out of my mouth.

“Let me try one,” she said, reaching for my cigarette.

The first time I ever smoked, I coughed a lot. I coughed every time I tried smoking until my seventh time, when my body had finally grown accustomed to the fact that I was inhaling tobacco and nicotine into my system. When Maddy asked me for a drag, I started coughing again, and the cigarette fell from my lips.

I held up a hand to my chest. “You –” I tried to speak around the rasp in my voice, the smoke that filled my throat “– you want to have a  _ smoke?” _ I coughed again. “I never would have taken you for that.”

Maddy shrugged simply. “Karen and Brett are going to have a difficult time getting wine today. I need something to take my mind off of it, and unless you want me to ask around for narcotics, smoking is the only alternative.”

I licked my lips and passed her the cigarette butt. “Take a small breath in. It’s going to be foreign to you at first, and your natural inclination will be to cough.”

She smiled slightly, easily positioning the cigarette between her fingers, and leaned back against the wall. Despite what I said, she took a long drag and blew out slowly. “Do you expect this to be my first time?” Her smile grew wider, dancing in her eyes. It was hard to see the smile in her eyes, though I didn’t know if it was because of the haze of smoke or because it had been such a long day.

I chuckled to myself. “You tricked me.”

“No one drinks at three anyway.” She blew out smoke rings, and I tilted my head. I didn’t know how to do smoke rings. She caught my eye and laughed softly. “Henry, I lived in Germany for a year and in Greece for three. The Greeks like to smoke a lot. You’d be surprised.”

My fingers twitched for my cig, but I wasn’t about to ask for it back. Maddy leaned forward and passed it back to me. “I’m not done with it yet,” she said.

I took a deep inhale and blew out the smoke in relief. The cigarette passed between our fingers. “How old were you when you were in Greece?”

Maddy pursed her lips. “I left Greece when I was thirteen. You know the story: Dad figured I shouldn’t have to keep moving around, so I came to Cincinnati.” She inhaled from the cigarette. “I was speaking more Greek than English, to be frank.”

I rested my head against the brick wall. The room was filled with smoke drifting around our faces, floating out the window with the encouragement of the breeze. The smoke tried to dissipate, but we exhaled another cloud of smoke before the breeze could do its work. “I know you told me a while ago,” I said, taking another puff before I passed the cig to her, “but where all did you live in Europe?”

She took a deep breath. “Um, I started living in Europe when I was four. We started in Spain, lived there for about six months, then moved to Portugal for the rest of the year. We moved to Italy after that, lived there for a year, moved to France and lived there for three years, and moved to Germany, then to Greece.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “God. My eyes hurt.”

I nodded. “Yeah.” My mind felt pleasantly light-headed, but not enough for me to forget the discomfort of a dead body. I needed another cigarette.

She blinked hazily at me. “Why don’t we go on a walk? I need some fresh air, and this poor room needs to air out without either of us smoking.” Scooting off my bed, she grabbed my wrist. “Come on.”

“Are you sure we’re allowed to wander around the campus with a murderer on the loose?” I asked her, grabbing my jacket. She waited for me.

“You know,” Maddy said, looping her arm through mine, “the Cranston police are turning this over to the FBI. Came up with some excuse as to why they couldn’t work the case.”

I frowned and locked my dorm room behind me. With my luck, Brett and Karen would come back while we were gone, and they’d have to sit outside and drink the bottle of wine all by their lonesome because Brett forgot the damn key. I could just see them, their backs pressed up against the door, tipping their heads back and taking a swig of the wine. It was probably Karen who managed to procure it. I wouldn’t put her past having a nearly legitimate fake ID. Though, in fairness, Brett is the oldest of us all.

“What reason could that be?”

Maddy shrugged and took the cigarette from my mouth. “Look, I don’t know. All I know is what Karen told me that Chelsea told her.”

“Oh shit!” I quickly unlocked my door and grabbed the cigarette from Maddy’s mouth.

She furrowed her brow. “Why ‘oh shit?’ What are we ‘oh shitting’ about?”

I tossed a glare at her over my shoulder. “We need to put this,” I held up the cigarette butt, “out before we reach the common room.”

Maddy crossed her arms over her chest and rocked up onto the balls of her feet. “Yeah, we probably shouldn’t smoke anymore for the rest of the day. It’s unhealthy.” She pursed her lips. “Well…I might. You shouldn’t.”

My mouth dropped open as I closed the door once again. The cigarette butt smoldered innocently in the ashtray, and I had double checked to make sure it was out. “Smoking is not healthy for you, Mad. You’ll get lung cancer.”

She raises her eyebrows. “Says the man who went through three cigarettes  _ today.” _

I winced. “Okay, you might have won this one.”

_ “Might?” _

When we left the dorm, we turned left and stuck to the right side of the cobblestone path. The fresh air filled my lungs, cleared out what remained of the cigarette smoke, and Maddy gently bumped into me. The breeze blew on the back of my neck, causing the hair at the base of my hairline to flutter. It cooled me off, a gentle replacement for the sweat I had gathered from smoking for the better part of the past six hours. Not consecutively, of course. I wasn’t that bad about it. Squirrels scuttled in front of our path, and Maddy pulled on my sleeve, dragging me onto a dirt path.

She tapped her fingers against my arm. “What– what if  _ we _ solved this case? Like, took a look at what evidence we had and all that?”

My mouth fell open. There was a time in my life when I had considered becoming a police officer, serving the greater good like my father did, but the idea of being shot at routinely just never tickled my fancy. I was the high schooler who tucked myself away in the library, studying interpretations of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, examining the Roman Empire and what made it great. I studied Shakespeare and sonnets, chemistry and compounds that led to poison.

I stopped walking.

“Poison,” I murmured. My eyes stared at the dirt in front of my shoes before I looked at Maddy. “Poison!” I said again, grabbing her hands.

Her eyes widened. “Poison? Why are you saying it like that?”

“Kimberly was poisoned. They’ll do a tox screen – that is, if the FBI is any good – but that only leads to cause of death. Any decent chemistry major or minor would know how to put that together and –”

Maddy smiled sadly at me. “Henry?”

“Hm?”

“It wasn’t poison, and you know it.”

I sighed heavily and pushed a hand through my hair. “It just…it doesn’t make sense. None of it does. I mean, why kill her? What threat did she impose?” I glanced at Maddy and nudged her. “I mean, out of everyone I know, you have the most motive.”

“What the hell is  _ that _ supposed to mean?!”

I held up both hands to placate her. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I know you didn’t do it. Look, let’s just let the FBI do their job, okay? We don’t know the first thing about crime solving.”

Maddy crossed her arms. “Do you think I could have done it, Henry?”

I pursed my lips and studied her. “Honestly, Mad? You would make one hell of a criminal.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, reviews and kudos are appreciated!


	3. o ponokéfalos apó methýsi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As one might expect, the murder of Kimberly Phoenix is the biggest deal on campus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was admittedly the most difficult to write but!!!! It was written!!! I'm proud of myself for finishing it!!!!!

While girls were allowed to come and go in the boys’ dormitories as they saw fit, boys were not allowed in the girls’ dorms. Ever. For any reason. There was nothing that could sneak us in there. Well, there were fire escapes, and a few desperate boyfriends climbed the escape when their roommate had a different girl over, but they were almost always caught. Whether it was the next morning or the same night, they were subjected to the walk of shame – often in their underwear, clothes bunched in their arms – while the RA and the dean hauled them out with a tight grip on their earlobe.

Suffice to say, Brett and I never snuck into the girls’ dorm, not even after all of this happened.

Though evenings were fairly pleasant back in Santa Barbara, evenings in Cranston were cold when combined with a breeze. My windbreaker was flimsy and goosebumps dotted my arms. Maddy walked as close to my side as she could, but there wasn’t much to be done.

Maddy and I had been walking for about an hour when Brett texted me with both the fact that he couldn’t find his key and Karen was working on picking the lock and how he didn’t think we should let the girls go back to the dorm, especially since they lived across the hall from Kimberly. I had asked Maddy about this, and Maddy nodded in relief and thanked me for inviting her to stay in my dorm.

We thought for a moment about whether we should stop by Maddy’s dorm, but she would gladly wear my clothes if necessary and, in some cases, if unnecessary. And since classes were cancelled for the rest of the week, there was no need for her to swing by and grab her textbooks. We passed by Weisser Hall, and Maddy gently nudged me away from her dorm and in the direction of mine.

She walked on her tiptoes for a few steps. “I’ll wear some of your clothes for pajamas, and Karen is more than happy to sleep in what she has on now. I just…can’t go back. Not tonight.”

I nodded. “That’s only fair.”

When we got back to the dorm room, the night air was still blowing through the room. Karen looked up from Brett’s bed and glared at me. “It’s because of your dumb ass that we have to sleep with the windows open. What if we all get murdered in our sleep?” She shook her head and resumed her book. “Damn smoking. Don’t even have the courtesy to smoke outside.”

I rolled my eyes and helped Brett roll out the sleeping bags. Maddy headed for my closet, rummaged around and pulled out my Gryffindor shirt. She smiled tightly at me and turned around.

“I highly doubt we’ll be murdered, Karen.”

She lifted her eyebrows. “You don’t know that.” Placing her book on the bed, she leaned forward and rested her hands on her knees. “I mean, Kimberly was already murdered.”

Brett stopped rolling out the sleeping bags and popped his back. “When do you think that happened? I never saw the body.”

I shuddered. “Be glad you didn’t.” I stood up and walked backwards to my closet. “That memory is forever engraved in my mind.”

Karen squinted at me. “Don’t you dare pull out another cigarette.” She pointed to Brett’s and my minifridge. “We have wine chilling in there. If you’re going to get rid of the memory, do it when we pull out the Scotch glasses.”

Maddy tossed her clothes into my hamper and jumped onto my bed. My shirt hung loosely over her body, and she hadn’t put on a different pair of pants. Before anyone could remark on her polka dot underwear, she pulled back my covers and slipped into the bed. “What kind of wine?”

Karen furrowed her brow and picked up her book again. “Um…it’s merlot, but I can’t remember what specific brand it is.”

Maddy shrugged. “Oh, merlot is fine.”

I ran a hand through my hair. “Guys, you do realize that we’re too young to drink, right? That it’s illegal?”

Brett crossed his arms. Karen quirked an eyebrow. “Do you want to keep the memory of seeing Kimberly like that in your mind for the rest of tonight? You know you won’t be able to sleep.”

I rolled my eyes and slid to the ground in front of my bed. “Okay, fine.”

Karen pulled the wine out of the minifridge once the sun came down completely. The breeze blew into the room, Brett and I changed, and Maddy found the Scotch glasses. We kept quiet, for fear that the RA was doing his rounds and listening for anything odd.

For someone who smoked regularly, I always felt uncomfortable drinking as long as I was at Eastern White Pine University. Maybe it was because I was underage, or maybe it was because we only drank either before or after something bad happened. In freshman year, we all got drunk and hungover, and it was the first time any of us failed a test. Maddy cried for three weeks. I waited for my father to call me from home and tell me to come back to Santa Barbara. The professor dropped our lowest test grade, thankfully, but it was more because he liked us the most out of all of his students. We didn’t deserve the test to be dropped.

Karen tipped her head back and drained her glass of wine. “Does anyone know when Kimberly was killed?”

I shrugged, rubbing my eye with my index finger. “My bet would be some time between last night and this morning.”

She glared at me. “No shit, Sherlock.”

“Oh, fuck off, Watson.”

Brett held up a placating hand while Maddy watched us silently, her glass pressed up against her lips. “Okay, okay. Listen, we won’t know anything until the first news article comes out tomorrow morning. We can run down to the drugstore and buy a copy.”

Maddy scoffed. “What are we, living in the 1950s? You buy the newspaper at a Starbucks, not at a drugstore. It’s weird if you’re young and buying a newspaper from a drugstore.” She sipped her wine. “Besides, I don’t think drugstores sell newspapers anymore.”

Brett pulled a face. “Well, what do you want to do? We don’t know anything except where she was found.” He finished his glass of wine and held it up for Karen to refill. She rolled her eyes and filled his glass. “We don’t have a damn idea who did it.”

Karen laughed and leaned her back against the wall. “Oh, why not Maddy?” She gestured towards Maddy with her glass. “Out of everyone we know, Maddy has the most motive: she knew Kimberly a) slept with Henry once and b) was still interested in Henry. Jealousy is always a serious motive to consider.”

Maddy smiled tightly. “Vas te faire foutre.”

Karen leaned forward. “Hey, I might not have taken any French yet, but I’m not so dumb as to think you didn’t say something  _ crass  _ –”

I whistled lowly. “Look, girls, it’s– Maddy didn’t do it.”

Maddy crossed her arms. “You would know, Karen. You didn’t sleep all last night because you were having phone sex with Richard. I didn’t do it. I was in the room all night.”

Karen pursed her lips. “I know that. I’m just saying that you have the most motive.”

“Henry’s not so special for me to murder someone for his affections.”

I sat up straighter. “I take offense to that. I feel like I should take offense to that. Brett, should I take offense to that?”

Brett pursed his lips and tilted his head side to side. “I wouldn’t recommend taking offense to that, but I understand why you would.”

Maddy jabbed her index finger at the hickey on my neck. “Why would I give Henry a hickey for the sole purpose to make Kimberly jealous only to kill her?”

Karen opened her mouth to respond, but she found nothing. “I’m just trying to prepare you for when the feds inevitably question you,” she finally said, taking a long drink from her glass.

Maddy narrowed her eyes at Karen. “Is that a threat?”

I sighed heavily. “I need a cigarette.”

Brett pressed his lips together in a thin line. “I might need one, too.”

Both girls whipped their heads around. “No!” they shouted at the same time.

Brett and I both pressed our index fingers to our mouths and shushed them. “Do you  _ want _ to catch the RA’s attention?” Brett hissed.

Karen and Maddy frowned. “No,” Maddy said glumly.

He nodded. “That’s right.” He sighed, twisted around, and grabbed the legal pad from off the top of his desk. “Okay, so what do we know thus far?”

“Kimberly was murdered,” Karen said.

Brett scribbled it onto the legal pad. “She was murdered,” he repeated. “Anything else?”

Maddy bit her bottom lip and swirled the wine in her glass. “She was either unconscious or dead when she was hung from the ceiling. There’s no way anyone could get a struggling person up there.”

I squinted. “How do we know the murderer had a motive?”

The rest of them laughed, but I had studied many cases like this in my legal studies classes. There were sometimes people who killed just to kill, to see what it was like, because they didn’t like the shape of a person’s nose, because they didn’t like a person’s skin color or sex, because they were serial killers. There was usually a reason for murder, yes, but there wasn’t always.

My father didn’t teach me much about life, but he always told me to rely on my gut instinct. It was how I passed high school and scored highly on the standardized tests. It was why I was on the summa cum laude track. My gut instinct was almost never wrong, and the more I thought about this case, the more I knew there was no motive.

I shook my head and looked at Brett. “What if this was a serial killer?”

Brett shifted uncomfortably. “Well,” he said, tapping the tip of his pen against the pad, “we know it wasn’t a serial killer because there’s only one victim.”

I licked my lips. “That’s my point, Brett,” I said quietly. Karen and Brett leaned forward. Behind me, I heard the sheets ruffle and I felt Maddy’s breath on the back of my neck. “Kimberly was the first victim. There’s going to be another murder.”

*

I think it is worth mentioning that Maddy has a drunkenness scale. She would not appreciate me telling anyone this, but I personally think her drunkenness scale is hilarious, if only because she goes through it so quickly. For instance, One Drink Maddy is horny, but in the “I want to make out and possibly give you a hickey” way. Two Drink Maddy is hornier than this, usually wanting to take off at least one article of clothing.

No one is entirely sure at which point Maddy gets blackout drunk. In freshman year, Karen, Brett, and I all hypothesized it was somewhere between four and five drinks, but we saw her get blackout drunk from three drinks, and we saw her get blackout drunk with two once – in Maddy’s defense, she was heavily sleep deprived and that probably had something to do with it.

The level right before Maddy gets blackout drunk, she starts talking in her own language. I like to call it “Madeleinia.” She meshes all of her favorite languages together into a mix of Spanglish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Latin, and Greek. Somehow, I had less difficulty understanding Madeleinia than Greek, Latin, or French.

The night the student body and the police discovered Kimberly’s body, Maddy was speaking her language faster than ever before. Karen blinked dazedly at her and left the room at one point to find beer. Brett and I were sweating – he had unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, his brown hair falling into his eyes, and he laughed when I dropped my glass of alcohol.

Karen snuck back in, a case of beer in her hand. She glanced at Maddy and shook her head. “Maddy gets none of this,” she said quietly, passing a can to Brett and me, “or else you boys will be listening to her hurl all night long into that tiny little trash can.”

Maddy sat up and reached for Karen’s hands. “Circalrípoutor dil septtá pourceienía delapóf damarmámoble sèstit prokózidottace nen Gréciáda.” Her eyes were glassy and her skin warm to the touch, her blonde hair sticking to her forehead.

Karen quirked an eyebrow. “What the fuck did she just say?”

I popped open my can of beer. “She said that about seven percent of the world’s marble is produced in Greece.”

Brett chuckled. “How do you know that?”

I raised the can of beer to my lips. “I am absolutely fucking fluent in Madeleinia.”

Maddy fell asleep shortly after revealing the bone-chilling fact about Greece’s marble production, and Brett and I kept going through the beer. Karen called her boyfriend. Richard was a nice enough guy, and we all got along quite well, but she was also…not subtle about the things she sometimes wanted to do to and with him. There were graphic descriptions. A lot of phone sex. Parts of my memory are missing from that night, and I’m convinced my brain did not want to remember Karen getting it on in the middle of my room. As uncomfortable as I was, I felt worse for Brett.

Brett raised his beer up in the air.  _ “‘Anchors away, my boys!’” _

I grinned and raised my beer, too, singing along with him.  _ “Anchors away! Farewell to college joys, we sail at break of day.” _ As we drew out “day” and sang it lower, we dropped our heads until we laughed at each other’s double chin.  _ “Through our last night on shore, drink to the foam. Until we meet once more, here’s wishing you a  _ hap _ py voyage home!” _

Karen ruffled Brett’s hair. “Can you two shut up?”

Brett turned his glassy eyes to her. “I’m part of the Navy ROTC. I am legally obligated to sing this whenever the opportunity arises.” He took a last drink from his can and crushed it in his palm. “And that opportunity is always consumption of alcohol.”

I set my beer on the ground next to me. “Do you know when you ship out first?”

He shrugged and rubbed the back of his neck. “Unless, like…World War III breaks out or something, I don’t ship out until I finish college. I think I’ll make lieutenant, as long as I graduate.” He yawned. “It won’t be for another two years.”

“And boot camp in between?”

His eyelids fluttered closed and he nodded tiredly. “God, I hate boot camp.”

I laughed quietly to myself. “You going to try and be some Navy SEAL? A national hero?”

Brett chuckled once and rested his head against his desk. “I don’t think I have it in me to be a SEAL. I joined the ROTC so they would pay for my college, and now…” He cleared his throat and blinked a couple times. “Henry, will it be worth it? In the end, I mean.”

I blinked. “Will what be worth it?”

He pushed a hand through his hair and gestured vaguely to the room. “I don’t know. This. Us. Our group of friends. College. Trying to solve this fucking murder. The Navy. Will any of it be worth it?”

My father had raised my brother and me as Catholic. I understood very little of it, just that we were supposed to make the sign of the cross when we prayed and to kneel. We couldn’t drink the sacramental wine, and we would have to confess to the priest when we did something wrong. My dad marked his confession dates on his calendar because he screwed up a lot. I remember one time he came home from confession pissed as a hornet in a bee’s nest because the priest refused to absolve him.

I remember Father Westley tried to explain to me once that God had plans for me that would lead me to a future with success and hope. I never really understood it. Sure, I believed that there was an intelligent designer for the universe – too many things were too precise, too breathtaking to be accidental. And I know Jesus was a person, but I don’t know how much else of the Bible is true.

I sighed heavily. “I don’t know, Brett,” I finally said. “You’re the Christian. Knowing if it’s worth it is kind of in your department.”

Brett swallowed and nodded slowly. “Sometimes, Henry, I’m just not too sure what all is going to happen.”

“Like a haze of smoke?” I said, the corner of my mouth quirking into a smile.

He barked out a laugh and nodded. “Yeah,” he said, chewing his bottom lip, “like a haze of smoke.”

*

As soon as his hangover passed, Brett and Karen got a taxi and went to see their respective significant others. Karen always bragged to us about how Richard wasn’t a student at Eastern White Pine, he was part of a normal college campus, he got to live in his own apartment off campus where nobody could interrupt them. Usually, we all groaned in complaint because, while Karen was never shy about talking about her sex life, none of us wanted to hear it.

I threw up a few times in the communal bathroom, my head pounding from the combination of cigarettes and alcohol from the day before. My vision spotted in the moment after most of the vomit stopped spilling from my stomach, my heart beat as if I had sprinted a marathon, and my hands shook. Sweat dampened my forehead, and all I could think was how badly I wanted a cup of black coffee, no matter how gross it was. Water, too. Possibly tea. Anything to get rid of this hangover.

When I stumbled back into my dorm room, I changed out of my shirt from the day before and tugged on my second favorite shirt. It was gray and big on me, and it had the justice scales on it. Though not as comfortable as my Gryffindor t-shirt, it was nice and it was massive, and I pulled on my college sweatpants and crawled back into my sleeping bag.

The floors in the Eastern White Pine dorms were made of pine, and they were rock solid. They weren’t heated, either. I was freezing all night, though if it was because of the hangover, the murder, or the floor, I didn’t know.

Maddy whimpered in her sleep, her right arm flopping from the mattress. I laughed quietly to myself, watching as she patted around for something. She rolled onto her back and continued snoring.

My body wouldn’t let me sleep anymore – my eyes wanted me to go back to sleep, but my back and shoulders adamantly refused – so I sat up straight and pressed my back against my mattress. The thought of checking my phone or watching a show made my head pound even more, but I doubted that I could hold a pen or a book, and even if I could hold either of those, I was not entirely too sure that I would be able to make out any words.

I swore, in that moment, that I would never drink and smoke that much in a single day again. I broke that rule several times over the course of the year, but each time, I made that same promise to myself again. At any rate, I was bored and reading English – let alone any German – was out of the question. I scooted over to my desk and reached above my head, patting around until I found a deck of cards. Pulling them down, I shuffled them quietly and started to lay out a game of Solitaire.

Sunlight slanted through the drawn curtains, and when I looked up from laying out the game, my eyes caught the light and my head pulsated. Normally, I’m a morning person, but all I wanted was to fall back asleep, and I refused to get in Brett’s bed to do it.

Close to three that afternoon, Maddy finally woke up. She pushed herself up and looked around the room blearily, blinking the sleep out of her eyes. Her hair was flat against one side of her head while the other side was a mess of tangles. I thought her hair looked like tangled yarn, like a mess of golden thread. I couldn’t see her eyes, but when she sat up, she fixed the sleeve of her shirt.

I tried to smile, but smiling hurt my head. “I thought you were a Ravenclaw,” I said as a greeting, but my voice echoed off the walls and I wanted to bury my head into a pillow.

Maddy smiled at me. “I am. You’re the Gryffindor, and your clothes are comfy.” She pulled my covers over her legs. “I left my textbooks here last night. Can you hand me my copy of Sapphic poems?”

I blinked at her. “You’re not actually thinking of reading. When you’re hungover.”

She lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “I just get sleepy when I’m hungover. What about you?”

“I want to die right now.” I grabbed her book from my desk and tossed it to her.

She laughed softly, and despite my aversion to sound, her laugh was so gentle that my headache lessened. She patted the bed. “Look, I’m just going to be sitting here. Why don’t you go back to sleep? That floor can’t be comfortable.”

I climbed onto my mattress. “Are you going to read me a bedtime story?” My back pressed into the mattress and Maddy crawled next to me, the book tucked underneath her arm.

“It’s written in Greek, you wouldn’t understand a damn word.”

I hummed in agreement. “Well, I can’t even look at words right now.” My arm wrapped around Maddy’s shoulders of its own accord and pulled her close. Her pink lips turned up into a smile, and she rested her head on my shoulder.

She rolled her eyes. “I can translate for you, if that would help.”

Shaking my head involved the slight movement of my brain, and the thought of moving my head any more than necessary sent a pulsing ache through my brain. I licked my lips. “No, English is too harsh for me right now. Just read it out loud. Maybe I’ll fall asleep easier.”

She lifted her head, letting her lips brush against my ear. “ S' agapó.” Her fingers twisted in my shirt. “Allá chreiázetai na koimitheís.”

I nodded slowly. “Just start reading, Mad.”

The only thing that ever could cure my hangovers was her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, reviews and kudos are appreciated!


	4. J'ai besoin d'un abri (I Need Shelter)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The biggest storm that Cranston has yet seen blows through the city

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This. Stressed me out to get done. In short, I'm just tired all the time, but that's fine, everything's fine, I will have a four hour road trip in the days to come, so things are fine. Anyways, my suggestion to those few reading this: listen to the song "The Secret History" on YouTube whilst reading this. Or The Imitation Game or Book Thief soundtracks. It helps

Rain pattered against the roof of the library. Brett and I blew in with the storm, shedding our raincoats despite the glare from the librarian. We grinned sheepishly and made our way to the back of the library, where there were worn couches, old books that we often rented for pleasure reading, and three walls to block off curious people from trying to listen in on any conversations we might have had.

Maddy was stretched out on her favorite couch, a copy of  _ Hippolytus _ in front of her. Karen, on the other hand, was sitting in front of the couch, her back pressed up against it, her sociology textbook in hand. On the ground, her notebook was filled with chicken scratch answering the questions Professor Axen assigned her. Maddy had earbuds in, her mouth quietly repeating the words on the page.

I tapped her leg, and she pulled her knees to her chest long enough for me to sit on the couch and drop my backpack on the floor. Karen jumped and twisted around, her hands clenched into fists and her pen ready to be used to stab the perpetrator. When I grinned innocently at her, she narrowed her eyes at me and turned back to her notebook. While I shifted through my textbooks, she launched a crumpled piece of paper at my neck with a surprising amount of force.

Brett glanced up from his math homework and laughed softly to himself, returning to calculus equations. Why he came to Eastern White Pine when it was a liberal arts school, I will never know, but he was the most equipped for life out of college. He was set to be a Navy engineer.

My college schedule often forced me to drown in homework, though it was my own fault. Philosophy homework was no big deal, especially since Professor Darden didn’t usually assign homework. The tests were also quite simple, considering that we just had to explain our reasoning for why we thought what we thought without circular reasoning. The problem came with my lack of study time, my smoking habit, and the drinking I did whenever Karen procured a bottle of wine.

Brett had helped me with my bio homework before we came to the library, had even checked over it a few times – and by “checked over,” I mean that he repeatedly mentioned that I was dumb and needed to pay more attention in class because “God, Henry, how do you fuck up a sketch of the  _ mitochondria _ you’re literally a fucking artist” – until it would earn a satisfactory grade. Maddy, though hesitant, helped me with German homework, considering that she was fluent in the language. She gladly helped me with literature when the opportunity arose, especially since we often compared the themes and motifs found in our assignments, but I had very little Lit homework that night.

Instead, I fished out my Middle Eastern History homework and began reading through the assigned reading. Rain continued to fall against the building, but thunder joined the chorus, gently rolling through the old brick walls. Maddy sniffled slightly and sat up, curling into my side.

  
Maddy is scared of thunderstorms.

She lifted my left arm and snuggled closer to me, setting her Greek homework on my lap. Actually, I wasn’t entirely sure if it was her Greek homework. She was brilliant enough, well-read enough in every one of her languages, that I could never tell when she was doing something for homework or for pleasure. One hand kept the book open and the other hand twisted into my shirt.

I moved my left hand to comb my fingers through Maddy’s hair. Her shoulders relaxed, and she nestled her head into the crook of my neck.

Interestingly enough, I focused better when Maddy was pressed into my side than when she wasn’t. I loved knowing that she was close to me, that I was the person to whom she always chose to turn. She didn’t turn to Brett, and she rarely turned to Karen. For some reason, she believed that I was enough to protect her from thunderstorms and spiders and murderers. Like I was Hercules or Achilles. But if I was Achilles, she was my Achilles’ heel.

Glancing up from my reading, I checked to make sure Brett and Karen were focused on their work before I pressed a kiss to Maddy’s forehead. Her lips quirked into a brief smile, and she lolled her head to see me better. “ L'affection du public dans la bibliothèque?” she whispered. “Avec d'autres personnes autour? Comment oser.”

I pursed my lips, brushing them over her skin. Her eyelids fluttered closed. “I love it when you speak French.”

“If you two don’t stop being disgustingly sweet, Spencer, I’m gonna fucking hit you in the head with this textbook,” Karen growled, not even looking up as she scribbled in her notebook.

I quirked an eyebrow. “That sounds like a threat. A murder threat, to be specific.”

She scoffed. “Please. I wouldn’t hit you that hard.”

Brett lifted his head. “Henry, we all did promise to do homework for an hour before we started looking at the new evidence the news released and trying to work together on this.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “And please, for the love of God, finish your homework now so I don’t hear you crying in the middle of the night or working through your assignments at three in the goddamn morning.”

I flipped him the bird. “Fine.”

The lights in the back room of the library flickered a few times. Thunderstorms were never particularly severe in Cranston, at least in the first year we lived there. For the first time, the thunder shook the little library, causing the hanging lights to swing back and forth.

Waves of thunder rolled through the air, and Maddy gripped my arm with a death-like vice. The lights dimmed before shutting off completely.

I cleared my throat. “I guess I can’t do my homework no–”

“Henry, I swear to God, if you finish that sentence, I am going to kick you out of the dorm room.”

Though Eastern White Pine was not a very old university, it was built from old buildings on the edge of Cranston. The newer buildings were designed to look as old as the older buildings. The lights were weaker than many in local homes. This was not the first time the electricity had gone out in the library, but it was the first time the power outage had been caused by anything other than a squirrel gnawing away at the power lines.

A circle of soft yellow light shined on the floor leading into the back room. Karen sat up straighter and pressed her back against the couch as far as she could. Over to my left, I heard Brett shift in his chair, and I felt Maddy tuck herself behind me.

The owner of the light grinned brightly when he saw us. Professor Darden stepped into our hangout. “Oh, hello!” He waved at us with his flashlight. “What are you all doing here?”

“Doing homework.”

“Crying.”

“Reading.”

Karen leaned forward and rested her arms on her legs. “This is the student library. Better question is what are  _ you _ doing here in the middle of the worst thunderstorm Cranston has seen?”

Professor Darden laughed softly. “Well, I might have imagined that you all were working, but I figured the students would have left by the time the lights started flickering. I was checking to see if there was a backup generator.”

I pursed my lips and scanned the ceiling, as if the little light offered from Professor Darden’s flashlight was enough for me to make a decent judgment on the condition of the power source. Spidery cracks ran along the corners of the ceiling, spreading and widening at the middle. The air conditioning stopped working, and a chill rushed through the room.

“If the storm is as bad as it sounds, then I don’t think a backup generator will do much.” My eyes roamed over the spider cracks, and my eyes met Brett’s across the room. He saw the same as I did, and it was new to both of us. “Then again, I don’t know what kind of generator the backup generator is.”

Professor Darden nodded. “Madeleine, you look frightened stiff.”

Maddy sniffed and curled closer to me. “Well, you say that fear is but a societal reaction to occurrences that don’t necessarily frighten us. True fear is much more obvious than perceived fear, and really, isn’t all fear perceived fear?”

He laughed. “Glad to know you pay attention to my lectures, Ms. Baker. Come now, the library is far from the best place to be during the storm.” He stepped closer to Karen and helped her to her feet. “I believe you all would be more comfortable in the boys’ common room. At the very least, you will be able to build a fire, and you can work by firelight.”

Karen squinted at him. “Professor, is it dangerous to be in here in the middle of a storm like this?” She crossed her arms, her notebook hanging limply from her fingers. “Actually, wouldn’t it be more dangerous for us to cross campus during this storm?”

Professor Darden nodded his head. “Yes, my dear, it is quite dangerous for you to be out in the middle of the storm, but with the lights out and a murderer on the loose, I would think it wiser to go back to your room.” He held up both hands. “But if you would rather stay here, then I will not stop you.”

Brett glanced to me then to Karen. “Well, we did say we were going to do homework, and we can only work by the light of our phones for so long. The smarter decision is to go back to the dorm. At least we have a wood fire there.”

Maddy’s fingernails dug into my skin. “But the storm, Henry,” she whispered to me.

I nodded. “Yeah, the storm is the difficult thing.” I pointed at the ceiling with my index finger, where the thunder rattled it, and all of us were poised for the inevitability that the ceiling would crash on our heads. “If it’s doing this to the library, how do we know that we’ll even get to the dorm? And besides,” I focused my attention on Professor Darden, “like you said, there is a murderer on the loose. If we step into that storm, then we’re at risk of being slaughtered.”

“We’re just as prone to getting killed here, but I can’t tell you if it’s because of a murderer or because the ceiling is about to collapse on us,” Karen said.

Maddy whimpered.

Professor Darden smiled tightly. “Don’t let me influence your decision, kids. I just recommend that you make it soon. The storm is supposed to get worse.” With that, he left us in the pitch black, taking his flashlight with him.

“Should we go back to the dorm?”

“Yep,” I said hurriedly, tossing my textbook in my backpack and zipping it haphazardly. Maddy gripped my hand tightly in hers, letting go only long enough for us to put our rain jackets on. She grabbed her umbrella, and I slung my backpack over my shoulders.

As I led Maddy out of the library, Karen and Brett on our heels, I leaned close to Maddy. “Is it just me, or did he seem like he was trying to get rid of us?”

Maddy pressed her lips tightly together. “I just hope we don’t get murdered on the way back.”

* * *

The girls, Brett, and I ran up to Brett’s and my room long enough to change. The rain had soaked us all the way through, the umbrella and rain jackets doing nothing to prevent the downpour. Maddy ducked into the closet and tossed us all towels, and we scrubbed our hair as much as we could.

The rain was cold, and the thunder only grew louder, indicating that the lightning was closer. Occasionally, while we were in the process of stripping our wet clothes off, we could hear the wail of sirens. We hoped, at the time, that it was just because a house caught fire and not because of another murder.

When my pants were halfway down, a thought slipped into my mind and whispered. I stood up straight. “Hold on,” I said, pushing a hand through my wet hair.

Brett furrowed his brow. “What is it? Do you need help? I’m not helping you.”

I shook my head and waved my hand dismissively. “Do we know if the murders are related solely to students on campus, or if the serial killer will eventually make his way to the general public? That is, if he hasn’t already.”

Everyone stopped changing and glanced around the room. “Henry,” Karen said, her voice trembling slightly, “what do you think it is?”

I licked my lips. “I don’t know. I’ll need to look at recent murders in the city of Cranston, see which ones were related to possible gang violence or crazed lovers or something.”

Brett squinted at me through the darkness in the room. Lightning flashed, all of us were illuminated by the blue of the flash, and the room was dark once again. “So you mean unsolved murders here?”

I nodded. “That’s gotta be it. It’s the only explanation. Unsolved murders without a decent suspect could give us a clue as to who the serial killer is, and if he’s just limiting his kills to students on campus or people in the city.”

Brett whistled lowly and peeled off his socks, tossing them in the hamper. “What do you have on this case that the rest of us don’t, aside from a cop as a father?”

I finished pulling off my pants, grabbed a change of underwear and a pair of gray sweats, and turned around so the girls wouldn’t see too much. Lightning strikes were unpredictable. “How about a cause of death and time of death?”

Maddy tugged one of my t-shirts over her head. “Wait, where did you get that information? No one has released that to the public.”

I tugged on my underwear quickly and turned around, stepping into my sweatpants. “The FBI wanted to question me last week. Said something about how, since I had once slept with her and she was bordering on stalking me, it would go to follow that I was a suspect.”

Maddy stepped forward and rested her hands on my shoulders. “Henry, how in the hell do you have that information?”

I held her gaze. “They showed me some information, a written tip, below her time of death and how she died, all according to the coroner. The coroner put it closer to that Monday morning, early – no later than three – and the cause of death?”

Karen tilted her head. “What? Blunt force trauma to the head?”

I shook my head and stepped closer to Maddy. “Poison. Snake venom, technically, but she was injected with crazy amounts of snake venom.”

Karen stumbled backwards. “That means…”

Maddy nodded. “Professor Wixor should be the prime suspect.”

* * *

The doors locked that night. Not by any of our own choices, but none of us were able to leave the dorm room without climbing through the window, and based on the way the window rattled with each roll of thunder and the way the room lit up with blue light between the rolls of thunder, none of us were all too interested in trying to sneak downstairs.

Brett rummaged around and pulled out a package of Oreos and a jar of peanut butter. He shrugged sheepishly and set the food on his desk. “This is all we have to eat tonight.” He lasered me with a glare. “Except for a cigarette, apparently.”

“Oh, fuck off, Brett, I haven’t had a cigarette since this morning.”

Since none of us could do our homework, Brett and I turned on our phone lights and crawled around on all fours, looking for any sort of candle that we might have had. I knew Maddy had given me a candle for a Secret Santa gift the Christmas before, and I knew I had shoved it into one of the drawers, but which one that was, I didn’t remember.

The school had a “no candles” policy, which I thought was bullshit, since they had no need to make every fucking thing out of wood. Were candles a fire hazard in this building? Of course. You know what else was a fire hazard to any building on the Eastern White Pine campus? Lightning, and no one could really control that.

Brett pulled out my underwear drawer, stuck his hand in the very back, and pulled out a homesick candle. It smelled like orange and sea breeze, and it became my favorite candle after that night. Brett set it in the middle of the floor, stuck his hand out for my lighter, and lit the wick.

Maddy rummaged through my closet, and Karen rummaged through Brett’s, and they both came out of our closets wearing our hoodies. Karen tossed one at Brett’s head, and he hissed when the sweatshirt slid off his face, nearly falling into the candle. She winced, grabbed her notebook and sociology textbook, and sat in front of the candle. Brett and I took this as our cue to continue working on our homework.

I grabbed a pair of socks (fuzzy socks – also a gift from Maddy, though this time for my birthday), slipped them on, and crouched in front of the candle. Maddy, though she had no work to do, sat next to me, pushed her glasses up her nose, and looked over my shoulder.

“That’s going to strain your eyes,” I murmured, as if me squinting at my homework while writing it in pencil and trying not to write over my handwriting again was any better. I couldn’t see anything. Maybe it was time to switch to pen. I never wrote dark with a pencil; even in the light, it was barely readable, and no, it wasn’t because my penmanship was so atrocious.

She hummed and rested her chin on my shoulder. Lightning lit up the room once, and her eyes caught what mine hadn’t been able to see – a drawing of a compass in the top right corner of my paper, with an  _ x _ as a substitute for each of the intermediate directions.

She tilted her head. “Well,” she said, “if the lightning keeps coming, then I can read just fine.” She pointed at the drawing in the corner. “What’s that?”

I furrowed my brow, grabbed the paper, and tilted it to see where she was pointing. “Huh. I’ve never seen that before.” I brought the paper closer to my face, eyes merely slits as I studied the picture. “It’s not something I’ve drawn.”

Never in my life had I drawn with pen. Drawing in pen is for those who do not fear the wrath of God that will eventually come to slay humankind. Drawing in pen is a mistake, even when it is just a doodle. Furthermore, the pen, according to the candlelight and the next flash of lightning, was a purple pen. No one owned one on campus, as far as I was aware.

Assuming the compass had been drawn correctly – according to most pictures of compasses – then a seashell substituted West, two feathers substituted East, a sun represented South, and a moon – or just a plain circle – represented North. In between North and West, there was an  _ x _ that was circled in black ink.

“What the –”

Maddy plucked the paper from my hands. “Who could have drawn this? And why?” She ducked her head to catch my eye. “Did you do this when you were hammered?”

I shook my head. “I would have noticed if I had drawn this while hammered. And I don’t know who would have a purple pen. It’s already scandalous if someone owns a green pen, and blue pens border on weird.” I waggled my eyebrows at her. “This is a Very Serious Institution.”

She rolled her head and smacked my shoulder. “I mean, I just want to know what this means. It’s interesting, to say the least.”

I pursed my lips. “So I don’t have to turn it into the FBI?”

Karen finally looked up from her sociology homework, rubbing her left hand. “Why would you turn it into the FBI? Is it a crime for someone to draw on your paper?” She shrugged and dropped her pen. “It probably just means you took their paper instead of your own.”

“You’re right.”

Brett glanced up from his assignment. “You should cut it off. You’re going to need to redo that assignment anyway. You know Professor Caxel doesn’t accept anything less than perfectly written.”

I sighed heavily. “You’re right.” I pushed myself backwards, reaching up and pulling a random sheet of paper off the top of my desk. “I just want to go to sleep.”

Thunder rolled, and Maddy whimpered, digging her nails into my arm. “How could you fall asleep with this weather?”

I shrugged. “Easy. I get hammered, and  _ then  _ I go to sleep.”

* * *

Now the thing is, when I was in college, I was one fucking dumbass. I mean it. I really was the dumbest fucking idiot on the planet. Actually, there was a person in Cranston who murdered at least four different people while we were there, and there are a good many people who justify murdering people and doing drugs and eating people and just all around bad things, so maybe I wasn’t the  _ dumbest _ idiot on the planet, but I like to believe I was the dumbest smart person to breathe. Then I met my son, and though I love him more than anything else in the world, he’s going to be a dumbass, if Spencer family genes mean anything.

Not the point.

Well, the dumbass point has merit because that night, as there was a murderer wandering around campus and as lightning flashed like a strobe and as thunder boomed across the night sky, I decided to watch a horror movie with Maddy. Now, I hate horror movies. Always have hated them. That night, though, Karen called me a pussy for not watching horror movies, and because I was such a dumbass in college, I naturally decided that I would watch a horror movie. Besides, nothing could get to us unless they or it wanted to climb the fire escape to the third floor in the midst of the worst non-hurricane storm Cranston had ever seen.

There was just enough battery on Maddy’s computer that we set it up, turned the brightness down, and crawled into my bed. Not because I was scared – which I was – but because she was scared of the storm. Brett and Karen played rock, paper, scissors for his bed.

She had suggested watching  _ The Conjuring, _ and I, not knowing how fucking terrifying that movie would be that late at night when Karen decided to fucking play the song “Tili Tili Bom” – a Russian lullaby about a man monster who murders children who don’t sleep – happily settled into my bed, arm wrapped around Maddy’s shoulders as she pressed play.

I saw things that night. I don’t mean that I  _ think _ I saw things, I mean I legitimately saw things and heard things that I never thought I would hear. At the time, I had managed to convince myself that it was just Karen clapping after the movie ended to scare me even more, but Maddy heard the clapping, too. Brett didn’t. Karen claimed not to have done anything. Besides, the clapping came from outside the room.

I also heard thud-like steps in the hallway, a choking sound, a whispered “please.” Nails on the glass, Kimberly’s face pressed against the window when lightning flashed, a snap of bone. Lullaby music played, though it wasn’t the same song as before. The Russian lullaby had stopped.

Maybe I was hearing and seeing things that weren’t there because I was so wound up from the horror movie on top of a terrible storm on top of Kimberly’s murder and the fact that the same murderer was wandering around town. I could have convinced myself if Maddy hadn’t experienced the same things.

Morning never came soon enough, and I swore off horror movies for the rest of my life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, kudos and reviews are appreciated! :)


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